> Chomsky called it a "maxim of Thucydides" not just on
> the web, but in the book Chavez waved at the UN, too
> -- it's not just "on the web stripped of context" or
> something. It relays a valid observation even without
> the stuff about the ancient wars, etc., you'd rather
> it had padded onto it.
As I pointed out some time ago, In _Deals and Ideals_ James Daly makes use of this passage from Thucydides to illustrate the difference between the the tradition in thought deriving from the Sophists and the one deriving from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
“No one sophist held all the views generally attributed to sophism, but I am following Plato in seeing Callicles in the Gorgias as typifying a possible extreme logical development of basic views shared by many of them, and widely current in Athens at the time, being given full sympathetic expression by writers such as the radical historian Thucydides and hostile expression by the conservative comic dramatist Aristophanes.
“Sophistic naturalism was relativist and individualistic, making the immediate particular arbitrary whim of any individual human mind or any social convention the measure of truth and value. The opposing spiritual dialectical enlightenment was communal, seeing a universal rationality common to the divine and the human mind as the measure of truth and value, and a potential source of total harmony. Sophistic moral relativism is the theory that all morality is, not contingently or in fact, but necessarily or in principle, an expression of will or power, by which every 'individual' secures her or his own 'interests' against those of others. The Sophists saw rules of justice as a convention imposed on others by each of us, as the means of gaining our own pleasure and avoiding harm from others. Protagoras claims in Plato's eponymous dialogue that the source of politics is Prometheus the bringer of technology, and that its instrumentalist function is a substitute for the animals' teeth and claws.
“The Sophists' radical interpretation of nature in general as raw and primitive stuff, which needs to be improved by art (that is, technology) led them in the case of human nature to an atomistic, mechanical and almost socio-biological view of human nature, and an instrumental view of reason as serving the passions by the social engineering of articles of convention. They claimed that that was being rational; that they were seeing nature as it is, and not as it allegedly ought to be or could be; they were being what Max Weber called "disenchanted". In fact, however, their view of nature was a reductionism which forced human nature into a Procrustean bed. They represented it as a manifold of finite beings competing for pleasure, possession, domination, in which the stronger individuals rule and, according to nature, should rule. Thucydides's account of the Athenians' Realpolitik attitude to the Melian delegation which came suing for mercy expressed their view succinctly: of the gods we believe, they said, and of men we know that the stronger rules and the weak submit. Men bargain about justice only when their forces are equal. We did not invent this law, we found it in nature, and we expect it to go on forever; that is why we apply it. You would do the same to us if you had the power. So they massacred the men of Melos, sold the women and children into slavery, and later colonised the deserted island.” <http://www.greenex.co.uk/philosophy/deals.html>
Ted